Having a loader equipped with a loading bucket permits the operator to scoop up loose materials, carry them a short distance and then dump them onto the ground or into a receptacle. Such buckets are very versatile and are used in a wide variety of earth moving and material handling jobs with great success.
However, there are some jobs for which the bucket is simply not well-suited. For example, when back-filling a ditch, using the essentially single purpose bucket to perform that task is tedious and inefficient, and frequently produces poor quality results. In order to return the long windrow or "spoil" of dirt to the ditch from a position alongside the ditch, the operator must repeatedly maneuver the tractor back and forth at an angle to the ditch, pushing and shoving the spoil pile into the open ditch while at the same time twisting and turning the vehicle which tears up the soil and grass in the vicinity. Much time is consumed in the process and the end result is not a particularly neat or professional-looking job.
Instead of the bucket, it would be better for the operator to use an angled dozer blade which has also been shifted laterally from a centered position so that the operator only needs to drive along the ditch in a parallel path of travel while engaging the line of spoil with the angled dozer blade and thus continually diverting the spoil directly into the ditch as the tractor moves along. However, while such side-shift-angle dozer attachments are currently commercially available, they are intended for use only after the bucket has first been removed from the loader arms, leaving a place for the side-shift dozer blade to be attached in their absence. While such interchanging of the standard buckets and side-shift-angle dozer attachments is theoretically quite possible, as a practical matter the standard bucket is seldom replaced with the dozer attachment because it is a cumbersome, time consuming and difficult task to do so. For one thing, the massive weight of the attachments themselves makes such interchanging job a considerable effort for one man to accomplish. Furthermore, the side-shift-angle dozer is usually only required for a relatively short period of time, whereupon it becomes necessary to reverse the procedure and detach the dozer blade and hook up the bucket. As a consequence, operators simply tend to make do with the bucket alone and leave the side-shift dozer blade back at the shop, even though use of the bucket for dozing, backfilling, and clean-up work has a number of disadvantages, as discussed above.